All those I spoke to, in Australia, London, Europe and the United States, were happy to share their memories of Hephzibah. In many cases, I detected a strong feeling of ownership. Several women described themselves as ‘dear friends’ of Hephzibah, yet a little probing revealed that they were surprisingly ill informed about some aspects of her this life: how probably long she had lived in Australia, for example. While this probably says something about celebrity – people are often eager to claim a well-known or glamorous person as a friend – I came to realise that Hephzibah’s revelations about her life and what mattered to her were often highly selective. I came also to believe that her warmth of manner, candour and apparent guilelessness often seduced people into thinking they were closer to her than they really were.

One interviewee, a Swiss-French novelist named Madeleine Santschi, declared: ‘Hephzibah was my close friend for many years. I don’t know whether she had the same feeling about me.’ I believe that several of Hephzibah’s friends felt the same way. Indeed, the most insightful comments I heard about Hephzibah came from her fellow musicians, suggesting that Hephzibah, trained to the piano from an early age, was more open in talking to them than in her interactions with other people. This suggests that she displayed qualities as a performers that were less apparent elsewhere. This is borne out by photographs. She is always smiling, warm, and friendly-looking, the perfect sister, wife and mother. However, at the keyboard she looks like a totally different person: quiet, reserved and utterly concentrated. And her playing has a responsiveness and empathy that were not always obvious in other aspects of her life. Hephzibah seemed – and often was – candid and spontaneous: her piano playing expressed another self altogether, and perhaps a truer voice.

Writing Hephzibah’s story meant confronting some very painful episodes, especially concerning her abandonment of her husband and two sons in Australia, when she fell in love with Richard Hauser. In 1954 this caused an immense scandal, the echoes of which influence some women’s opinions of Hephzibah to this day. (‘Leaving a man, yes, we can all understand that, but I cannot understand how a woman can walk out on her children,’ was a comment I heard many times.)

Hephzibah’s sons, Kron and Marston Nicholas, had both described what happened the day their other left in Curtis Levy’s documentary film Hephzibah (1998). Kron said he did not see her for three years afterwards; Marston said she left the day he started school. Both are powerful statements, and both have naturally led those who have seen the film to consider Hephzibah a cold-hearted, callous woman But Hephzibah returned to Melbourne to visit her sons six months after leaving and kept in constant touch with them by telephone. In letters to her parents, she provided many details about what both boys were doing, eager to show that there was no ill-feeling between her and the boys.

I asked both Kron and Marston, now in their sixties about the differences in their memories and the evidence I had discovered. Kron said his mother’s absence from his life had seemed to last three years, and that memory plays tricks. This seemed a little equivocal, but understandable considering the trauma of Hephzibah’s departure. Kron also told me he had been very angry with his mother, that the divorce had been ‘bloody awful, as they always are’. When Hephzibah moved to England with Hauser, he hardly contacted her for several years. In his early twenties, he began writing her long, furious letters, accusing her of considering herself and her work more important than her children. These letters evidently shocked and hurt Hephzibah, who retorted that the kind of mothering Kron wanted was appropriate only to ‘very young children, the very sick and the very old’, and that when people became independent they needed ‘partners and friends to help them develop’. Kron accepted his mother’s words, and they eventually established a friendly and comradely association.

Marston’s response was more complex. In the documentary his remark about Hephzibah ‘s having left the day he started school gave the impression that he was about five at the time. Simple arithmetic reveals that he was nine years old, although admittedly about to start at a new school. (Leaving a nine-year-old is not quite as awful, I think, as abandoning a little boy on the day he starts at school for the first time.) Marston acknowledged that his statement had been misinterpreted, shrugging it off by saying it was ‘all ancient history’ anyway. I knew that Marston, the small boy who at three had, according to his mother, ‘told us every­thing he had known and thought and wished for and expected’, became withdrawn and distant for a long time after her departure, and it seemed that on some level he was still angry with her. But Hephzibah and Marston did reconcile: Marston, a talented amateur cellist, played with her at a Musica Viva concert in Melbourne in the late 1970s, a happy experience for them both.

Richard Hauser’s daughter by his first marriage, now the distinguished feminist commentator, broadcaster and writer Eva Cox, was fond of Hephzibah, and she has always been publicly critical of her father. In interview I found her calm, forthcoming, helpful and, considering her reputation for forcefulness, surprisingly non-directive. However, when I sent her a copy of the unedited manuscript to check details, and when she saw others’ comments about Hephzibah and Richard and read the conclusions I had drawn about their relationship, she not unnaturally sprang to her father’s defence. She spent some time explaining in more detail her father’s methods and beliefs, and I incorporated her observations in the finished book. However, I have since realised that readers are less likely to remember noble motives, however passionately expressed, than a man who walks into the living room where people are watching television, says ‘boring’, changes the channel and walks out again.

Richard and Hephzibah’s daughter, Clara Menuhin­Hauser, also reacted strongly when she saw the manuscript. Always prickly about the book, she had been reluctant to give much real help, partly because she was busy but also, I think, because of her own ambivalent feelings about her upbringing. She was living a contented domestic life in South Carolina, and really did not want to be reminded of certain episodes from her past. In a long and vituperative e-mail, she accused me of tearing her parents apart without giving anything back. I have not heard from her since.

Janet Malcolm describes the journalist as a thief ransacking the drawers of people’s lives: yes, there is some­thing of that in writing biography, and certainly Clara would agree. But not long ago I had dinner with Kron and Marston Nicholas in Melbourne. Although I have not been acquainted with them for more than a few years, I do know something about who they were and how they have grown. This is the kind of knowledge that can sometimes encourage the development of friendship, and I feel that in this case it has. Meeting generous-spirited people who are willing to share difficult and painful aspects of their lives with you is sometimes, I believe, one of the biographer’s great privileges.